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Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development

Scott is a Senior Consulting Partner of Scott W. Ambler and Associates, working with organizations around the world to help them to improve their software processes. He provides training, coaching, and mentoring in disciplined agile and lean strategies at both the project and organizational level. He is the founder of the Agile Modeling (AM), Agile Data (AD), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), and Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) methodologies. Scott is the (co-)author of 19 books, including Disciplined Agile Delivery, Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, The Object Primer 3rd Edition, and The Enterprise Unified Process. Scott is a senior contributing editor with Dr. Dobb's Journal and his company home page is ScottWAmbler.com

A fair question to ask is why should your organization consider adopting the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework. I believe that there are several clear benefits to doing so:

DAD shows how agile techniques fit together. DAD is a hybrid that adopts strategies from a variety of sources, including Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Agile Modeling, Kanban, Outside In Development (OID) and many more. More importantly DAD's process-goal driven approach shows how this all fits together, providing advice for when (and when not) to use each technique and the advantages and disadvantages of doing so. In doing so DAD enables you to streamline your efforts to tailor agile to reflect the context of the situation you find yourself in. Furthermore, it provides this advice in the context of a full agile delivery lifecycle, explicitly showing how to initiate a project, construct a solution, and then deploy into production. Instead of starting with a small agile method such as Scrum and doing all the work to figure out how to tailor ideas from other methods to actually make it work, why not start with a framework that's already done all that work for you?

DAD isn't prescriptive. DAD is far less prescriptive than other agile methods. For example, where Scrum prescribes a single strategy for managing changing requirements, a strategy called a Product Backlog, DAD suggests several strategies and provides advice for choosing the right one. Where other agile methods define a single lifecycle, DAD instead describes several lifecycles (an agile Scrum-based one, a lean lifecycle, and a continuous delivery lifecycle to name just three) and once again describes how to choose the right one for your situation. Your agile team is in a unique situation, and as a result needs a flexible process framework that provides coherent, easy-to-follow tailoring advice. Isn't it better to adopt strategies that reflect the context that you actually face?

DAD explicitly addresses architecture. Even after a decade of agile software development it still seems that the topic of how agile teams address architecture is a mystery for many people. As a result DAD builds agile architecture strategies right in, starting with initial architecture envisioning, to proving the architecture with working code, to evolutionary design strategies during construction.

DAD explicitly addresses DevOps. DevOps is the art of combining development and operations approaches in such a way as to streamline your overall efforts. DAD "bakes in" DevOps through explicit support for common DevOps practices as well as its robust stakeholder definition which explicitly includes operations and support people.

DAD explicitly addresses governance. Although governance is often considered a dirty word within some agile circles, the reality is that software development teams can and should be governed. Sadly, many agile teams have traditional governance strategies inflicted upon them, strategies which invariably increase schedule, cost and risk on the project. But is doesn't have to be this way. It is possible, and very desirable to adopt agile goverance strategies, strategies which are built right into the DAD framework.

DAD explicitly addresses many other important development activities. Architecture, DevOps, and governance are just the tip of the iceberg. DAD also shows how critical activities such as analysis, design, testing, quality, technical writing, and many more are addressed in an agile and streamlined manner throughout the delivery lifecycle. As described earlier, this is done in a non-prescriptive and tailorable manner, thereby removing a lot of the mystery regarding how this agile stuff all fits together into a coherent whole.

DAD is solution focused, not software focused. Although the rhetoric around "potentially shippable software" resonates well with developers it observably and empirically misses the mark. DAD promotes the more robust idea of "potentially consumable solutions". Yes, shipping is nice but shipping something that people actually want to use/buy, something that is consumable, is much nicer. Yes, software is part of the equation but that software runs on hardware, we often also need to develop supporting documentation, we often evolve the business process, and even evolve the organization structure around the usage of the system. In other words, we're really producing solutions, not just software. Isn't it better to adopt rhetoric that actually reflects what we're doing in practice?

DAD promotes enterprise awareness over team awareness. One of the great benefits of an agile approach to software development is its focus on the team. This can also be a bit of a problem, because a team-focused strategy can result in suboptimal decisions for your overall organization. DAD promotes the idea that disciplined agilists should be enterprise aware, working towards common business and technical goals while leveraging and enhancing the existing infrastructure whenever possible.

DAD provides a foundation from which to scale. The starting point for scaling agile is to understand how agile strategies fit together from project initiation to delivery into production. If you don't know how to succeed with agile in a straightforward situation then it will prove very difficult to do so in an agility @ scale situation. DAD not only provides this tailorable foundation from which to scale agile it also takes a robust view of what it means to scale agile (hint: large or distributed teams are only a start).

DAD provides a basis for enterprise agile. As organizations move towards a true "enterprise agile" approach they often find that they need to adopt either DAD as a foundation or invest a fair bit of effort inventing something similar. They are also starting to adopt strategies from the SAFe framework, or reinventing such, as well as ideas from sources such as Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) (sadly, poorly named in hindsight), ITIL, and even CoBIT. More on this in a future blog posting.

In short, DAD provides a lot of proven advice culled from years of experience applying agile software techniques in enterprise-class environments. Instead of figuring all of this stuff out on your own, why not jump ahead and leverage the hard-won lessons learned from other organizations that have already dealt with the challenges that you're struggling with today?

The primary shortcoming of the DAD framework is it makes it very clear that software development, oops I mean solution delivery, is quite complex in practice. As IT practitioners we inherently know this, but it seems that we need to be reminded of this fact every so often. DAD doesn't provide a simplistic, feel-good strategy that you can learn in a few hours of training. Instead it defines a coherent, tailorable strategy that reflects the realities of enterprise IT.

Recently I have been asked by several customer organizations to help them to understand how to account for the expense of agile software development. In particular, incremental delivery of solutions into production or the marketplace seem to be causing confusion with the financial people within these organizations. The details of accounting rules vary between countries, but the fundamentals are common. In order to get properly account for the costs incurred by software development teams you need to keep track of the amount of work performed and the type of work performed to develop a given solution. Time tracking doesn't have to be complex: at one customer developers spend less than five minutes a week capturing such information.

Why is Time Tracking Potentially Valuable?

There are several financial issues to be aware of:

Capitalization. For public companies capital expenses (CapEx) can potentially boost book value through the increase in assets (in this case a software-based solution) and increase in net income (due to lower operating expenses that year). On the other hand, operational expenses (OpEx) are accounted for in the year that they occur and thereby reduce net income which in turn reduces your organization's taxes for that year.

Matching. One of the goals of good accounting is to accurately reflect the net income of the enterprise and to prevent income manipulation or "smoothing". As such a key tenet is the principle of matching revenues with the appropriate expenses. For software this means that we expense the cost of the software over the lifetime of the asset against the income at that time. An implication of this is that capitalizing software development, when appropriate, before the software goes into production clearly violates the matching principle since there is no benefit of the asset until such time.

Tax Credits. In some countries you can even get tax credits for forms of software development that are research and development (R&D) in nature.

The point is that the way that a software developer's work is accounted for can have a non-trivial impact upon your organization's financial position.

I don't understand what you're asking (5% of responses, one of which was mine so that I could test the poll)

The poll results reveal that we have a long way to go. Of the people inputting their time more of them believed it was a waste of time than understood it to be a valuable activity. When you stop and think about it, the investment of five minutes a week to track your time could potentially save or even earn your organization many hundreds of dollars. Looking at it from a dollar per minute point of view, it could be the highest value activity that a developer performs in a given week.

The discussion that ensued regarding the poll was truly interesting. Although there were several positive postings, and several neutral ones, many more were negative when it came to time tracking. Some comments that stood out for me included:

It's a colossal waste of time unless you're billing a customer by the hour.

We record time spent on new development work (as distinct from other tasks such as bug fixing in legacy code and so on) as this is capitalised as an asset and depreciated.

I think the *most* pointless example was where the managers told us what we should be putting in.

One day we will move past the "just do it" mentality and have some meaningful conversations and the reasons for what we do.

In my experience time tracking is a massive waste... of time. It's a poor substitute for management.

Why do you need to know more than the info available through Sprint Backlog, Sprint burndown and the daily standup?

Some of my teams (I am SM for three teams) are skeptical about this. They do not think that keeping track of task hours this way will be any more useful than the daily standup reports. And they do not believe that Management can resist the temptation to use task hours as a measure.

I think that there are several interesting implications from this discussion:

Agilists need to become more enterprise aware. It's clear to be really effective that agile delivery teams need a better understanding of the bigger picture, including mundane things such as tax implications of what they're doing. In Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) this is something that we refer to as being enterprise aware. There's far more to enterprise awareness than understanding pertinent accounting principles, for interest disciplined agile teams work towards a common technology roadmap and common business roadmap, but appreciating why time tracking is a potentially valuable activity would be a good start.

Management needs to communicate better. It's also clear that management needs to communicate more effectively regarding why they're asking people to track their time. To be fair, management themselves might not be aware of the tax implications themselves so may not be making effective use of the time data they're asking for.

Management needs to govern more effectively. Several people were clearly concerned about how management was going to use the time data (by definition they are measures) which could be a symptom of both poor communication as well as poor governance (unfortunately many developers have experiences where measures have been used against them, a failure of governance, and no longer trust their management teams to do the right thing as a result).

Time tracking should be streamlined. It was obvious from the conversation that several people worked in organizations where the time tracking effort had gotten completely out of hand. Spending 5 minutes a week is ok, and to be quite blunt should be more than sufficient, but spending fifteen minutes or more a day doing so is far too much. Over the years I've helped organizations design measurement programs and I've seen a lot of well-intention efforts become incredibly onerous and expensive for the people they were inflicted upon. I suspect it's time for a reality check in some of these organizations people were alluding to. A good heuristic is that for any measurement you should be able to indicate the real cost of collecting it, the use(s) that the information is being put to, and the value resulting from those uses. If you can't quickly and coherently do that then you need to take a hard look at why you continue to collect that metric. The lament "we might need it one day" is a symptom that you're wasting time and money.

Agile rhetoric is getting in the way. Some of the team-focused agile practices, such as burndown charts (or better yet ranged burndown charts) and stand up meetings may be preventing people from becoming enterprise aware because they believe that all of their management needs are being met by them.

You may be missing out on the benefits of time tracking. Many organizations are potentially leaving money on the table by not being aware of the implications of how to expense software development.

Parting Thoughts

Disciplined agilists are enterprise aware. This is important for two reasons: First, you want to optimize your organizational whole instead of sub-optimize on project-related efforts; second, you can completely miss opportunities to add real value for your organization. In the anecdote I provided it was clear that many agile developers believe that an activity such as time tracking is a waste when that clearly doesn't have to be the case. Worse yet, although someone brought up the issues around capitalizing software development expenses early in the conversation a group of very smart and very experienced people still missed this easy opportunity to see how they could add value to their organization.

Granted, time tracking on an agile project team is nowhere near as sexy as topics such as continuous integration (CI), TDD, the definition of done, continous architecture, or many more. But you know what? Although it's a mind-numbingly mundane issue it is still an important one. 'Nuff said (I hope).